SUMMA consortium to present new prototype at EACL 2017

The first prototype of its multi-lingual media monitoring platform will be presented on 6 April 2017 at the EACL 2017.

The SUMMA consortium — the acronym stands for Scalable Understanding of Multimedia — will present the first prototype of its multi-lingual media monitoring platform on 6 April 2017 at the 2017 Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2017) in Valencia, Spain.

Coordinated by the University of Edinburgh, SUMMA brings together leading research institutions in the field of Natural Language Processing—the Universities of Edinburgh and Sheffield, University College London (all in the UK), Idiap Research Institute (Switzerland), Priberam Informática (Portugal), and the Qatar Computing Research Institute (Qatar)— with major national European news organisations—the BBC (UK), Deutsche Welle (Germany), and the Latvian News Organisation (LETA; Latvia)—to develop a new software platform for monitoring news streams, from TV news broadcasts to text to public social media feeds in multiple languages, thus allowing journalists to detect, track, and interpret developments in the world more quickly and more accurately, and also allowing multilingual news organisations to produce news more efficiently by fostering cooperation between news rooms across language barriers.

The Platform

Using cutting-edge Natural Language Processing Technology, including Deep Learning / Neural Networks, straight from the research lab, the platform will be able to automatically transcribe spoken language (e.g., from live broadcast or news video feeds on the internet) in several languages, translate transcripts and written text into English, recognise mentions of people, places, events, etc., determine how these entities relate to one another, and enter these reported facts into a factual knowledge base, facilitating fact checking ("Is there another source corroborating this story?"), researching background information, and an organisation's own awareness of its own news reporting ("Have we reported on this elsewhere in our large, multilingual organisation?").

The University of Edinburgh

The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number
SC005336, VAT Registration Number GB 592 9507 00, and is acknowledged by the UK authorities as a
“Recognised body” which has been
granted degree awarding powers.